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Is Instagram the Best Thing to Even Happen to Photography?
>> MIKE: Here’s an idea: Instagram is the greatest thing to ever happen to photography?] music In care you’re a time traveler from 2009, Instagram is a photo sharing app for mobile phones that lets you take a picture and then apply a filter to it which makes it look like it was taken with old, broken, Soviet, toy camera. But it has a certain as the French might say, “I don’t know what.” Surely whatever that I-don’t-know-what is can’t compete with DSLRs, big CCDs, ISOs, and all the professional photography acronyms. And it can’t. A fancy DSLR with a big lens will always take a sharper photo than your iPhone. But. The art of photography is about so much more than just accurately capturing the stuff in front of you. An Annie Leibovitz portrait expresses a lot more than just look-at-this-famous-person and an Ansel Adams photo is about a lot more than mountains and trees. Okay, it’s kind of about mountains and trees but there’s a lot of other stuff in there, too. Photography is about creating an emotional response and delivering a message through color, composition, and shape. These are ideas which are not reinforced by your typical camera phone. shutter sound Camera phones are for the guy who wants to take a picture a funny sign, a drain pipe, a really weird looking bathroom, feet, a dead bird. That last one? That’s a little weird. Not until Instagram, Hipstamatic, Pixplease, and others were people people really thinking about the artfulness, the emotions, the messages they wanted to convey with their mobile phone photos. And without these things, you’re taking a snapshot. Which is very different from composing a photograph. And with Instagram’s instant feedback, you quickly learn which photos create a response. siren Is your photo boring? Put a filter on it! Still boring? You probably took a boring photo. There’s no film, try again! windchimes A lot of people call these instant nostalgia options lazy, but they’ve given a million would-be photographers an opportunity to think about mood and visual style. Yes, some of the moods it’s especially good at are: I-might-be-color-blind, I-just-woke-up, and why-is-there-vaseline-on-my-eyeballs? But camera phone or not, some of these photos are legitimately amazing. Just because it’s a camera that fits in your pocket doesn’t mean it can’t make a great photo. There are over forty million Instagram users worldwide who have uploaded over four hundred million photos. Instagram is enabling an army of cellphone users to creatively capture the world and events around them. If Twitter has turned everyone into a potential journalist, maybe Instagram has turned everyone into a potential photojournalist. And maybe that is worth a billion dollars. What do you guys think? Has Instagram changed the future of photography? Let us know in the comments. And if you like us, subscribe. whistle There were a ton of awesome comments on the memes video. Let’s take a look at what you guys had to say: zanzus44 wants to know why we don’t have a million views. Awe. Thank you guys. porcupineschool makes a really awesome point about the development of user generated culture as a set of artwork independent from the artworld. Damn, yeah. WeltenbrandBM asks that we redo our Kant because it is so compressed it is nearly wrong... Nearly wrong. Novecentino thinks one of the coolest things about memes is that it is culture and that it is worldwide culture. We agree. Brazilian memes are really cool. neonatalpenguin says Louis CK’s handsome, effeminate, younger brother has great taste in music. Uh, thanks. And if you guys want to get involved in this conversation, there’s a great, animated GIF filled comment tread The Verge. There’s a link in the description. roms3 says, “I love memes.” We love memes! We should hang out sometime. Category:English Category:Complete